YouTube as a Legal Information Tool

The free online video site YouTube is perhaps most well-known for its many clips of Brazilian supermodels, people's pet bunny rabbits, excerpts from The Colbert Report and Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, and every teenager from Melbourne to Montevideo playing air guitar along with Van Halen.

Well, it now looks like the legal world has discovered the potential of using this hugely popular site.

The Parisian daily Le Monde reported last week that lawyers representing an individual being detained by U.S. authorities at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp have produced a video posted on YouTube.

The January 11 article ("Les avocats d'un détenu de Guantanamo plaident sa cause sur Internet" = Lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee plead his case on the Net) provides a link to the 9-minute video entitled Guantanamo Unclassified.

YouTube is also starting to be used by law professors and law librarians. For instance, the Law Librarian Blog contains a January 12, 2007 post about a 3-minute movie called Legal Research: The Movie that has been posted on YouTube.

Doing a search on the YouTube site using keywords such as "library" or "librarian" will pull up more material.